nVentures raised $1.5 million for its first fund, from its own partners and a small network of individual investors, and deployed it across 13 companies. Four years in, it has had two exits and returned cash to investors. Among funds of its vintage, that combination is uncommon. Now, on the strength of that record, it is raising a second fund targeting over $10 million.
Behind its track record is a deliberate approach. The fund applies three filters before backing a company: the founder, the sector and the type of business. The founder carries the most weight. After the cheque, it stays in the work alongside its companies: hiring, sales, partnerships and fundraising. Most venture funds would stop at the cheque.
The roots of nVentures go back to an earlier deal. Imal Kalutotage, Ashok Verma and Martin Strommer had previously run nCinga Innovations, a Sri Lankan software company, which they sold to Zilingo, a Singapore fashion platform, for $15.5 million in 2019. nVentures, built in part on those proceeds, is today led by those three founding partners alongside Chalinda Abeykoon as managing partner and two general partners, Sanjaya Mohottala and Kumar Buvanendaran, both serial entrepreneurs themselves. Their mandate: to back Chase acquired the company, a financial technology firm built by a Sri Lankan engineering team for the British pensions market, in early 2026. The terms of the WealthOS deal are confidential. According to Crunchbase, nVentures was among the investors in a £2 million funding round led by Barclays Corporate Banking, part of the £4.3 million WealthOS raised in total. “The only thing we can say publicly,” Abeykoon said, “is that it’s more than what the London Stock Exchange paid to acquire MillenniumIT.” In 2009, the LSE paid $30 million for that deal, roughly 73% in cash alongside an estimated 600,000 LSE shares. What nVentures received from the sale has not been disclosed.
Across its first fund, nVentures’ TVPI — the combined value of cash returned and stakes still held, expressed as a multiple of invested capital — stands at 1.81x. Its DPI, the share already returned in cash, is 0.26x: 26 cents for every dollar invested has come back to investors. Three portfolio companies have raised follow-on rounds at higher valuations. Mintpay’s stake is now worth 6.4 times what nVentures paid for it; Nanosoft, a cooperative banking platform, 3.2 times; Simplebooks, a bookkeeping and compliance tool, 2.5 times.
None of these increased stakes are cash yet. And several of those positions are denominated in currencies that have moved the next generation of founders.
Chalinda Abeykoon – Managing Partner at nVentures
“We know how to take a company from minus one to zero and zero to one. Our goal is to make them investor-ready for larger funds to take over.”
Singapore is where nVentures is registered with an MAS license. Sri Lanka is where it operates. Abeykoon runs the fund from Colombo. Seven of its 13 portfolio companies serve Sri Lankan customers, and both companies it has exited had engineering teams here. Its first fund raised 50-60% of its capital from the general partners themselves, an unusually high GP commitment that signals skin in the game. The rest came from about 20 individual limited partners — roughly 70% of them Sri Lankan diaspora, the remainder Indian, Singaporean and Japanese.
“We are among the very few funds of our vintage who already have liquidity,” says Abeykoon. “Most funds who are four years old haven’t had any exits.”
Two exits, one still under wraps
Between February 2022 and late 2025, nVentures deployed about $1.5 million across 13 companies in Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, India, Singapore and the United Kingdom. The thesis was B2B, with a heavy focus on fintech. The first cheque was $50,000 into Mintpay, a buy-now-pay-later platform. Two health-tech investments also qualified under the fintech thesis; both, Abeykoon said, were building “the infrastructure side of things: doctor consultations to medicine delivery to integrating pharmacy.”
The first of the fund’s two exits was Kaiju Labs, a Web3 company acquired by KAST Finance, a Singapore-based neobank now operating in more than 150 countries. The deal valued Kaiju at approximately $2 million, returning 2x for nVentures at a 48.6% IRR.
Imal Kalutotage – Founding Partner at nVentures
The second exit, WealthOS, is harder to size. JPMorgan sharply. The Sri Lankan rupee has shifted from about 300 to 320 against the dollar in recent months alone. nVentures incorporates its portfolio companies outside Sri Lanka where possible, partly to keep equity value removed from local currency swings, but operations still run in Sri Lankan rupees, Bangladeshi taka, and Indian rupees. “It’s every emerging country’s problem,” Abeykoon said. “Investors who come into this region understand that — they price it in.” That may be true for the fund’s strongest positions, where exit gains could dwarf the currency drag. For the weaker ones, the arithmetic is harder.
Ashok Verma – Founding Partner at nVentures
Among the 11 companies still in the portfolio, four are profitable. Two more, Abeykoon said, are on course to reach profitability by year-end. A few he describes as amber: still running, not growing as a tech startup should. Nothing has been written off.
How nVentures decides to back a founder and what it does after
When nVentures first backed Kaiju Labs, several local investors had already passed. The founders arrived with a presentation, a product in development and a vision, and a room full of enthusiasm, and Abeykoon’s own admission, evolving tech and space, yet nVentures decided to bank on the team’s tenacity anyway. Within roughly 20 months, KAST Finance had bought the company at a 100X revenue multiple.
Martin Strommer – Founding Partner at nVentures
That willingness to back founders before the thesis is fully legible is deliberate. “We’ll start with a small cheque,” Abeykoon said. “We like the problem you are tackling. We like you, your experience, and tenacity. Go figure it out, and we are here to back you along the way.” Sameera Nilupul and Chameera Wijebandara, the founders of Kaiju Labs, had previously bootstrapped LiveRoom, a software company specialising in augmented and virtual reality, to $1 million in annual recurring revenue.
“We knew if we gave them the room and backed them 100%, they could figure things out. All of us being from a tech background gives us the advantage of identifying exceptional talent.”
The search starts before any pitch. nVentures monitors founders on LinkedIn and at events, often before they are ready to raise. Most deal flow arrives inbound, supplemented by referrals from LPs, partners, and accelerators, including Accelerating Asia. From that volume, the fund narrows on three filters: founder persona, industry vertical, and company type.
On founder persona, Abeykoon has documented publicly the traits the fund looks for —all of which are centred on intrinsic motivation and resilience under pressure. It does not back founders who chase press coverage over progress, or those who refuse to commit full-time before a round is closed. But the founders it does back share little else in common. Nanosoft’s founder, Sanjeewa Pathirana, built cooperative banking software from Kuliyapitiya, a small town outside Colombo. “There is no single mould,” Abeykoon said. The question the fund asks is not what a founder is building but why
Kumar Buvanendaran – General Partner at nVentures
What the fund will not negotiate on is the speed of execution. Dossiers, a compliance technology company, was backed by a presentation alone, with no product and no paying customers. Its founders had run Watchdog, a media startup, and were known to the team. Two days after the investment meeting, they sent an update, reshaping the product in real time. “It’s almost like an escape room,” Abeykoon said. “You gotta figure stuff out. If you’re figuring it out, these guys are good.
Sanjaya Mohottala – General Partner at nVentures
Once a cheque is written, nVentures works with its companies across four areas: hiring, sales, partnerships, and fundraising. The clearest illustration of the last is a debt facility it arranged for Mintpay through HNB — roughly Rs75m ($250,000), unsecured, since extended and supplemented by other banks. “The total funding raised by our portfolio is probably closer to $6-8 million,” Abeykoon said, against the $1.5 million the fund actually deployed.
Beyond capital, nVentures gets into the work directly: supporting the sales process, sourcing senior hires as portfolio companies grow. Two or three portfolio companies are currently being helped to build out leadership teams. The LP base is part of this. The fund has assembled a network of investors, operators, and domain experts. A Harvard Medical School board director takes an active advisory role with Flash Health, one of the portfolio companies. AWS staff working on safe AI development are part of the same network. “They’ve done a phenomenal job in connecting, advising, and helping our founders,” Abeykoon said.
Scaling the model
nVentures is now raising a second fund, targeting $10 million+ — five times what it raised the first time. About 20% is already committed, from existing investors increasing their stakes and new ones joining alongside them.
The thesis sharpens rather than widens. nVentures will still back B2B companies, but at the enterprise level specifically: software for businesses and institutions, in sectors that now extend beyond fintech to healthcare and deep tech. Geography broadens to founders building in the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia and Singapore. Cheques start at $100,000, rising towards an average of $250,000 and up to $500,000. The fund will continue to focus on pre-seed and seed stages, at valuations below $10 million.
“We know how to take a company from minus one to zero and zero to one,” Abeykoon said. “Our goal is to make them investor-ready for larger funds to take over.”
Where nVentures has no prior record in a domain, Abeykoon plans to bring in investors and operators from that field to take active advisory roles alongside the GP team — what he calls a second row: a bench of domain specialists who deepen the fund’s credibility in each new vertical. . He also wants to cut the roughly six-week average decision time from Fund I.
“The total funding raised by our portfolio is probably closer to $6-8 million”
The ambition is to hold a specific position in a narrow field, not to be broadly competitive. “If I am the best entrepreneur,” Abeykoon said, “I want to have Andreessen Horowitz. I want to have the number one investor.” He wants nVentures to occupy that position in enterprise B2B across a few narrow domains. Whether a $10 million fund can credibly claim that ground against the firms already there is the question the raise will answer.
Behind the market logic is a longer project. ESOPs (Employee Share Ownership Plans) are standard across the nVentures portfolio, the same model that allowed staff at nCinga to share in the Zilingo exit. As KAST’s valuation grows, Abeykoon believes as many as 100 Sri Lankans will become dollar millionaires from the Kaiju deal alone by 2028. “It’s just not one or two people who make the money,” he said. “It trickles down to so many people. They will either become entrepreneurs or they will become investors as well.”